Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/PostMortem

Contents

Elections Spring 2012 Post-Mortem

What Went Well

People seem satified that results of the elections are consistent with the goals and direction of the project. Success. (Satisifed the questions: did the "right" people get elected.)

What Can Be Improved

The election workflow involved too many disparate tools and manual intervention. The announcements went on the blog and mailing list, the nominations are on etherpad, the confirmation of nominees happens via email, the candidate's platform are on the wiki, the preparation of the ballot is on CCIV tool.

If a vote needs to be restarted again -- in this case a candidate was missing -- it's essential that this can be done without revealing results.

Voters from author files should be automatically added to PPB election, or at least explicitly notified of election and the requirement to register.

There was a potential for some awkwardness with an incumbent being able to combine their normal leadership with their campaigning.

Improvements

Have a system with consistent presentation and ability to facilitate awareness of the candidates, demonstrate candidates contributions to date, and conversation with them. The system should also manage confirmation of the nominees in order to avoid sending email to nominees to confirm their intentions.

Candidates agreement on how and where campaigning will be done. From there have time for candidates to make up their campaign and proposals.

Authors files have to be kept up to date, with valid email addresses and no duplicates. Authors should be added to the list of allowed voters for PPB, skipping the registration process.

The policy should be amended: on http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Model where it says "Any registered member of an OpenStack Launchpad group is eligible to run and vote in these elections. " it should say "Any registered member of an OpenStack Launchpad group is eligible to run in these elections. In order to vote, the members of OpenStack Launchpad group will also need to register on the voter's election tool whose URL is communicated at election time".

Additional consideration to be used *carefully*: Use the process to create more buzz for openstack, it may be an opportunity to let more people know that this is an open community and participative.